


winter (throws us to the safety of our clothes)

by imgoingtocrash



Series: Twenty-Something [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bodhi Rook (mentioned) - Freeform, Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus (mentioned), F/M, Fluff, Meet-Cute, Rated T for Mild Language, The Coat makes its modern appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:24:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9857816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgoingtocrash/pseuds/imgoingtocrash
Summary: “Murder, Jyn thinks, is going to be the crime that puts her in jail for the first time. Well, only if you don’t count her smaller stints in a cell for misdemeanors as a teenager. Petty crimes committed for Saw’s attention notwithstanding, however, her troubles with the law stopped after she turned 18.Killing the stupid bastard that decided to set off the fire alarm at one in the morning? That will be worth it, she decides.”AKA: The “Our apartment building’s fire alarm went off while you were mid-shower. You’re clearly freezing standing outside, here, borrow my coat,” AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Part of this comes from living in a dorm that does fire alarm tests about once a semester. I’ve never been that person, but I’ve seen it happen before.
> 
> There’s also a jab here at my history textbook because it eats up hours of my time taking detailed notes in a pitiful hope of improving my understanding while I weep and continuously feel unprepared for tests.
> 
> Title is from Twenty-Something by Noah Gundersen, a very good College AU song in my opinion.
> 
> Enjoy.

Murder, Jyn thinks, is going to be the crime that puts her in jail for the first time. Well, only if you don’t count her smaller stints in a cell for misdemeanors as a teenager. Petty crimes committed for Saw’s attention notwithstanding, however, her troubles with the law stopped after she turned 18.

Killing the stupid bastard that decided to set off the fire alarm at one in the morning? That will be worth it, she decides.

 

The thing is, it’s not just about the fire alarm. 

She got home from a late class, perfectly content to at least try and study for her upcoming exam in the morning, but Bodhi poked his head in long enough to distract her and leave to go to some party being hosted by Han Solo _in the middle of the week when sane people had classes to deal with_ and she never really, well…studied. She resigned herself instead to the late night cramming session in her future and only took the shower as a break. A quiet, blissfully steaming shower to let her pop her aching back from sitting at the kitchen table for so long with the history textbook from hell.

About halfway through said shower, washing the shampoo from her hair, the fire alarm blared. She considered ignoring it, at first, but damn it all if some idiot was going to get her dead just because he lit his Chipotle burrito on fire trying to reheat it in the middle of the night with the aluminum foil on.

So she slammed the water valve off, threw on her robe, shoved her keys, wallet, and phone into her hand, and trudged barefoot down the stairs along with everyone else.

 

That’s how she’s ended up here, in the apartment complex’s parking lot, longingly staring up at her bathroom window in the hopes that just remembering the shower will bring warmth back to her body.

She’s aware at how she must look: wet hair probably seconds from frosting in the twenty degree weather, robe tied up and clinging to her like a still-wet towel, and bare feet hopping back and forth uncomfortably against the frosted concrete. 

She glares daggers at anyone willing enough to meet her gaze, whether they’re filled with sympathy or not. (Except for Baze and Chirrut, the lovely couple that lives across the hall and lets her and Bodhi come over for dinner some nights of the week. She doesn’t know why they choose to live in an apartment complex mostly habited by students in the first place, but Chirrut always says something about it making him feel younger and she’s long given up on refusing their many offered neighborly kindnesses.)

It’s between what must be her hundredth movement in an attempt to gain feeling in her limbs that a soft warmth settles around her shoulders. It takes her a moment not to shrug it off immediately, mostly because it’s very possible she’s going to freeze and die out here and the warmth is a much more pleasant way to go.

It’s a jacket, when she finally looks. Something blue and puffy and weather appropriate with fur around the collar. Definitely not hers or anyone’s that she knows. 

“Don’t worry about getting it wet,” says a voice to her right. The man is a little less than a foot taller than her and wearing black sweat pants, a tan henley, and a pair of heavy boots. His fingers are firmly stuffed into his crossed arms and his black hair is kinked up at awkward angles as it blows against the wind. Not her fire alarm perpetrator, at least, she doesn’t think. He’s better off than her, but no less pissed at the situation. She decides as a curtesy to both herself and him, she’ll be nice and keep the jacket on instead of flinging it to the ground. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Bit of a lost cause anyway,” she replies, pulling the material around her frame a little tighter without putting her arms through the sleeves. She doesn’t want to stand here long enough to need them. “You lend this thing out to a lot of random, soaked women in parking lots?”

He chuckles, adjusting the hood to cover her hair with one hand. “No, I think this is a first.” He shrugs when she looks at him full on, his brown eyes catching her green ones. “You looked cold.”

“Yeah,” she says, because there’s a mound of evidence that she is in fact just that. “Well.”

They stand there in silence for a moment, watching the flashing reds and whites of the fire trucks as they linger to the beat of the wailing alarm. She doesn’t see a fire or really any smoke, but they haven’t been cleared to go in yet and it’s making her antsy. Despite the jacket, her feet are still having to work for every degree of warmth they can manage as she lightly bounces on her toes.

“So, is there a reason you were up this late? Y’know,” _Showering_ , the man doesn’t say, and she knows it’s all just trying to make conversation. She usually runs from that sort of thing, had with inquisitive neighbors who tried to make nice for a long time before they got the message. Chirrut and Baze only got in mostly because they realized they could get through to her with Bodhi first and only sightly because if the two older men didn’t cook for them, there wouldn’t be much cooking that wasn’t microwavable getting done in the Erso/Rook household.

Somehow, with this man and his shaking shoulders and half-awake eyes, it’s not so hard. “Up studying.” She sighs, wanting to lie down in the shower and take a nap rather than put any sort of effort back into her textbooks. Maybe she can say her apartment actually did burn down and she needs to do a make-up test. Yeah, that’s got a nice ring to it. She might even be able to summon up a really good cry if she tries hard enough. “History exam at 9.”

He hums in sympathy, shoving his now balled fists into his sweatpants. “8 AM class, myself. With Professor Draven, no less.”

“Ugh,” Jyn groans, because she had him for a freshman class and almost stayed out of the science department entirely because of it. The man is a holy grading terror with anger management issues to boot. Not to mention the numerous, precious minutes of her life he wasted on lecturing her whenever she happened to fall asleep in his class. Not her fault all of his classes were before 9 AM, the bastard. “He's the worst.”

“I’m his TA, actually.” The man huffs, scratching his facial hair lightly and quickly shoving his hand back out of the cold air. “But somehow I’m having a hard time disagreeing with you.”

She looks up at him, scrunching her eyebrows together and with no intention of apologizing. “Is he lording a graduation requirement over you or something? My roommate said Professor Krennicgot fired for something like that in the engineering department.”

He laughs at that, kicking a loose pebble on the ground in lieu of something better to do. “I took the class before and he seemed to be impressed. He said he needed someone to help him connect the material better to the students. Apparently Professor Mothma has been kicking up a storm, trying to attract more undecided freshman to the department without scaring them off. As I assume he did to you…?”

“Jyn,” she says, almost without thinking about it, and then she blurts out the part she often has tried to leave behind. “Jyn Erso.”

His eyes widen the smallest bit in recognition, the question of _Erso?_ on the tip of his tongue because it always is. When they call her name on the roll, when they ask her how she’s doing: her last name is lingering in the air, in the places where her father used to be. It used to be a point of pride but it’s been raw for a long time now, her father not teaching, her father not being here, her father not alive anymore.

Somehow, as if sensing it’s the wrong question to ask, he simply nods, an acknowledgement and a silent agreement in one. “Cassian Andor.”

This makes Jyn’s eyes go wide, because she’s heard that name before.

 

(There’s this neighbor on her floor. He’s tall and lanky with blonde hair and he speaks in the most annoyingly recognizable monotone she’s ever heard. 

They’d met in the hall just once, as she was slightly more than tipsy and digging in her bag for her keys and well, the takeout that toppled from his arms and into the floor when she nudged into him surely wasn’t her best first impression.

“Oops,” she’d said, slurred somehow into a giggle, a sound which she didn’t really mean to make but didn’t have the verbal control to take back. “Sorry.”

The man just sighed loudly as if this was a regular occurrence in his life, drunk girls spilling his Chinese all over the hall carpet. He looked at the food on the floor, then at her hand, still in the bag, then at her face, as if memorizing it to put directly on his shit list.

“Oh, for christ’s sake, _the keys are in your hand_ ,” he stated sharply, cleaning up what he could of the mess on the floor and and not sparing her another look as she moved on to trying to decipher which key went into which lock.

“Cassian will not be pleased by this,” she heard him mumble, going down towards the end of the hall and fiddling with his own keys, the apparent new occupant of 5F’s previously vacated living quarters.)

 

“You live in 5F?” Jyn asks, wincing sharply when he nods. She wonders how she was portrayed in the story his roommate likely told about their ruined meal. Simply another drunk co-ed in the hall? Maybe something more specific like Ruiner of Food, She Who Brings Shame Upon This Apartment Building? She doesn’t know him well enough to tell, but she imagines it’s more harsh than she would appreciate, especially towards…no, Cassian has now seen her sopping wet and freezing. There’s not much at this point she could do about how he sees her, whatever that view may be.

“I see you’ve met Kay, then?” Cassian asks, eyes darting towards another corner of the parking lot where the man in question is giving Cassian a look of disdain from his seat on the hood of a silver SUV. If the look is at their predicament or at the fact that Cassian’s speaking to her, she’s not really sure.

“Something like that,” she replies, hoping that if Kay happens to mention that she and the drunk who bumped into him are one and the same, she can deny any existing memory of the event and convince herself and Cassian that it didn’t happen.

A loud horn echoes into the night, one of the firefighters with his arm straight in the air and with a megaphone in his hand for their attention. “Sorry about the wait, folks. Looks like a false alarm. You’re all free to return to your units.”

If Jyn could be anymore angry about this to warm her blood, she certainly would be. Instead, she wades into the pack of apartment dwellers, Cassian at her side as the crowd thins out onto their own floors the higher up they go. At the very least, the stair climbing has her blood moving again.

She reaches her door, about to shove the key in the lock before she remembers she was in such a hurry she didn’t actually lock up. She almost forgets about Cassian beside her, her sole focus on getting inside and returning to the shower when he says “Jyn,” at her back.

She turns, looking up at him in the warm light of the hall, how it puts shadows on his cheekbones, over the underside of his nose and lips. She tries very hard to stop thinking about his lips as they move. “It was nice meeting you,” he states, his hands now relaxed and his thumbs hooked in the sweatpants’ pockets. “Good luck on your test.”

“Thanks,” she replies, a little dazed as he smiles down at her, genuine and maybe with something more than just neighborly affection at the edges. “Good luck with Draven.”

He turns then, waving his hand up loosely before following Kay into his apartment and rolling his eyes at whatever apparently came from Kay’s mouth the moment they were close enough to speak.

The night, from there, goes on as was planned. 

She returns to her shower, warming her limbs and shampooing her hair all over again just for the excuse to stay in longer. The clock, now reading 2:30 AM, convinces her to stay up only another 30 minutes to study before crashing on the couch with her phone alarm set for the morning and a prayer she can remember enough about European opium trade to get by the inevitable essay question.

 

(She doesn’t realize Cassian’s jacket is still in the bathroom where she peeled it off until the next morning.

She pulls it on over her sweater and leaves with the ghost of a smile on her face, almost, she thinks, matching his from the night before.

She’ll return it after the exam. 

It’s only partially as an excuse to talk to him again.)

**Author's Note:**

> My idea for Jyn’s timeline in this verse is something like this: Jyn grows up with Galen until she’s about 10, her mother having already died earlier on. Then Galen dies and she goes to live with Saw, causes some trouble as a teenager, and somewhere during that period of her life meets Bodhi. She decides to not only go to college, but to the same one her father taught at in the hopes to feel more connected to Galen and to find some purpose after her rougher teenage years.
> 
> This fic was a lot of fun to create! All kudos, comments, bookmarks, etc. are welcome and appreciated.


End file.
